You're listening to the identity of the center podcast. This is a show that talks about identity and access management and making sure you know who has access to what let's get started. Welcome to the identity of the center podcast I'm Jeff. And that's Jim. Hey Jim hey Jeff, how are you? Oh, not so bad yourself. I think we have an issue with temperature control. I don't feel like there's an issue at all. Fill. It feels crazy your way sometimes. This is happening.
There are certain non-negotiables 665 degrees in York. It's, I'm looking at the thermostat 66 degrees in here. It's like an icebox in here. It's nice. This is cool. This is like, you're going to write your user me out of here. Well, I've got a lot of technology in here, you know, we have to keep it cool. To make sure that things are operating at a consistence level. Here's something most people probably don't know about. You is, you're pretty environmental Jeff.
It's 110 degrees outside and in her room is like 66. Yeah. And there's three air conditioners in this week. By the way, there's three different thermostats and I have them all set to 66 because I need to be cool and I have my fan running here next to me. I've spoken my piece. All right, so we're here at the Gartner. I am Summit AT a lot of different conversations with very cool people in the industry. Our next one is no different.
It's with Jamie Lewis grow. She's the vice president Solutions engineering and strategy with sabian's. She's also a great friend and family of the program welcome back. Jamie thank you for having me. This is fun. Yeah so this is the original I think not original I was I was probably the add-on but the strategy team for identity strategy team. Exactly. So it's been a little bit of like a homecoming. I think for a lots of the former ident rope Ian's that have been a Shore House.
We've done like different areas but the three of us were the strategy team for Gartner. We were we developed a strategy and roadmap for Gardner the. I think that the Eternal identity and access management but there's still something to be proud of. I'm not sure if we can say that but we just did some. You just said that due to limitations have maybe a elapsed, it was probably for what five years ago, maybe roughly. But yeah, kind of a cool little feather and all of our campuses
like hey thanks. So who did Gartner go to to create their? I am strategy. Oh, they went to Jamie Jim and Geoff. Yes! Lord. Remember, people used to say you have to have the first initial J to work at your company. He had also Jeff Chang and a few others. Anyway, we digress. All right, let's get back. Let's get, let's get on top. Let's get to it. Yeah, let's talk identity. So Jamie, how's the conference going so far for the conference is going? Well, there's a lot of energy.
It's certainly keeping us busy. There's a lot of people wanting to talk to us in the booth. So, it's exciting. We get to, you know, tell customers about the benefits of our organization. How to solve? Business problems and just a lot a lot happening. I did notice that your booth had a lot of foot traffic, so I'm trying to have you been spending at the booth? First going on, striking up conversations with people? I would say 90% of my time has been striking up conversations
in the booth in the booth. Okay, yeah, yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I fantasize everybody is like, pretty open to, you know, conversations like Sit down with some folks today at breakfast. And one of the people was wearing a shirt with the little Hershey's kiss on his, they do you work for her. She's as like, ya know, just the fan did, you know our shirts? I hope you saw. I'm pretty sure I saw you. You have like a t-shirt shaped like beer, koozie. We have beer cozy.
Yeah, that's cool. Beer koozies for the Beer Garden tonight, but no, the, I know Pam shirts and I know, Pam to mmm. Yeah, mmm. You should check them out, right? Thank you. Each need a shirt. I'm sure we'll stop by get.
Get some get some right? That's the one thing I haven't done yet is go really through the vendor home or the expo hall, whatever we're calling it. And actually, like talk with a vendor's, I feel like I've just been working the whole time and not only had a chance to like, actually explore and talk with some of the vendors out there, I was hanging out the one Cosmos one Cosmos Booth. I can say that one Cosmos booth for like five minutes and I saw there's people who go around
from Booth to Booth who just yeah. My badge so I can get this way. Although swaggered of the you have and throw them bag so I know why do they want to carry all those home? I don't I just don't know what were no. I mean early in my conference going days I would try to get the t-shirts and you wash them twice and then you have to throw them out because they fall apart. Not that savings t-shirts like that I'm sure they're very high quality and are very high
quality. High quality cotton gold and platinum threads yes stuff like that. I don't know, every conference seems to have those folks who like to just accumulate all the stuff that is. That is true. It's like RSA was the same way.
I remember walking through like if you've been RSA it's at the Moscone Center downtown San Francisco and they have this tunnel that basically connects North and South which is typically where they have like the Thunder halls and I remember walking through a couple years ago and they'll the walls were lined with people with bags of stuff like big shopping bags to
handers both. Hands like loaded with Just Junk and I'm like, okay, how are you going to get that anywhere and it is that how is that worth anything to anyone, right? I don't get it stress. Squeeze balls. Yeah, when I was stupid stuff, I mean Jeff you forgot to mention. Also we are in this luxurious Suite. We are 66 degrees and our friends at our SM are paying the bill for us. So we're very appreciative of that. They are. Thank you very much Artisan for keeping me cool while.
We're putting out this hot podcast. Yeah yes I don't think we have to pay extra for sure our conditioning but well I we've got technically cops too. So we trade this Cubs for t-shirts. That's a good trait. And icid, tumblers, we've been given away to folks who have been appearing on VIPs, only VIPs only, yes. And anyone else who we can get up here. So, let's get back to the conference because you mentioned, you were having conversations one of the conversations that you had was
Actually a presentation. Yes, it was a panel that you hosted yesterday that was called stories of cloud identity transformation. And you had representatives from brown-forman Wawa and Phillips 66 for folks who didn't catch it live. I guess, what's the synopsis from from that conversation? Yeah. So I would say that overall theme was really about technology using technology to enable a larger Cloud
transformation strategy. However, it's not just about technology so it goes back to some of the principles that the three of us are very familiar with, as we did Consulting with our customers, is that it's all about policy. You need to nail a policy. The policy that needs to be supported by the process, the process needs to be supported by the data and then you have success with technology. So it was, it was a pretty interesting conversation. They came with different perspectives.
Certainly, there is A lot of discussion around, you know, how do you approach moving from Legacy to Cloud, you know, to support those initiatives? Was there? Anything surprising? I'm sure you prepped for it. But, you know, with, with the folks are on a panel but was anything surprising? That came from a story perspective was like, oh, I hadn't really kind of like, thought of that or was it? Yeah.
I kind of knew what I was getting into and sort of what to expect or maybe it was even the panel themselves were they didn't realize really what they were getting into. I sort of had some realizations after the fact. Yeah, I think that what often goes on not unnoticed. But I think what organizations don't think about is the support that's necessary from a multitude of various resources
to be successful. And that's something that each of them touched on it at one point or another is, how do you bring together the right collections of people You be successful and whether that's to streamline onboarding, whether it's to do data correlation, whether it's to do, clean up, it goes back to realistic, time, schedules and how you lead your team's through those programs because you have so many touch points that often the often aren't thought about, I guess.
Yeah, I was also thinking is there sitting that session We talk about those three organizations. You measure was a brown-forman. Wow. And while well until it's. Yeah. So I mean, there's our organizations that were already Big 10, 15 years ago so they've already had IM systems probably Legacy systems that were replaced by Saving. I'm obviously guessing right. I don't know the background, man, but my perspective is when you're going to drop in a new
system, you have to be willing. Open-minded to change and that change includes a, maybe the way we've been doing things is not the way we should do them in the future for some people that's common sense. Right? For other people. That's like sacrilege, like there's no way we're to change how he on board people, right? Ya know there's a lot of business process reframing that has to happen. Because why Port something over from a legacy solution into something that is going to give
you the advantage. Age of intelligence and make suggestions to you, in terms of what users should have access to what users shouldn't have access to. You know, you certainly don't want to pour it over bad processes and bad data into a new solution.
So certainly process re-engineering and I think that goes overlooked to, I don't think a lot of customers, spend a lot of time realizing that there's there's work that they need to consider as part of their Yeah, a lot of y'all to make garbage, what do you got garbage?
Exactly this more of it, more efficient garbage, generation minutes, you've talked a few, you know, we talked a little bit about, I guess your role here with save Ian's, tell us about Sabian. I think one thing that we want to kind of bring to folks especially this week of Gartner's, getting getting people familiar with some of the vendors that are in this space. What a Sabian do how you guys different from others that are that are competing in the same area. Yeah, it's funny.
So it was roughly, I don't know, five six years ago where a sad day oh where Jeff? And I discovered save Ian and we were looking at the fine grain entitlements and s0d capability. That was specific to sap. And we thought, huh? This is interesting. They're doing something a little bit different, it's very configurable. There's a lot of visibility. There's a lot of orientation around key indicators, and Health of programs. And as we peel back the onion, we had more and more interest so
much. So that I said, I think I'm going to go work for this company. So here I am four years later and I think that was one aspect. It was they were already converging you know years ago where they started, we started with fine green entitlements management. We realized very quickly that we had to wrap identity governance and administration around that. At, and then we've continued to converge from there. So, you know, being a solution that was architected born from
the cloud. And, and it had the inherent intelligence that, you know, these types of platforms need were some of the, you know, very early reasons why I thought it was going to be a pretty interesting company and and start to shake up the industry a little bit. Remember sitting in that demo with you and I was like, oh, this is, this is different. This is interesting, like it Is
it showed a lot of Promise? Remember seeing it the first time, just because of the, the approach that was being taken with the sap rules, for example, right? And that was a weakness that others in the space had and it's a notoriously difficult system for any IGA vendor to really kind of get, right? And it was, it was interesting.
It's, it's always fascinating to see, you know these, these vendors and out there saving included, but others, you know, playing in the same space and their evolution on the different capabilities and I look at save Ian and I see A platform, right? And we were talking with, we saw maida and clear skies built on a platform, they're built on the servicenow platform, right? So, I see this is sort of like the other side of that coin, which is okay. We want to have our identity
system, be the platform, right? Yeah. And we've done it in a way that it's been very organic in nature, you know, we're our own platform, we haven't done a number of, you know, Tech Acquisitions, but we then have to fold into Our solution. So it's all been very natural.
We have some Visionaries, you know, in the organization and that's what brought us to Pam, you know, needing and seeing the the need for that single Enterprise journey and the appropriate context that you apply to that single Enterprise Journey. So that, you know, if you're a regular user doing regular user things, you can do it very easily versus if you need Need to perform something that's
administrative in nature. Well, we only want to give you the access that you need for that moment in time and that moment in time might be five minutes, it might be 10 minutes and giving the visibility to ensure that whatever was done with the access that was granted for that period of time or just generally speaking. If you're a regular user that we have the history you know behind it to support that Enterprise Journey. Can you prove what you said you did? It happened in the way.
You said it was going to happen. Rent. Exactly, yeah. One of the things that I've always felt when I saw saving, was that, you could really configure the system to work the way you want. And I think like this, why? There are so many parts, so many products in the imc's, there's different ones that suit different needs and different organizations wants and desires. So my thought on the configurability is like I love
that personally. I'm like, I want It to be able to tune the system to the way I want others want. Like, give me the exact, you know, Simple Simon way to configure the system, and I don't want that configurability, but I think that as a product, or as a platform, you have to decide which end of the spectrum.
Are we going to be on? Or we're going to try to restrict your ability to configure the system, or we going to enable that and it seems to me that Savings more on the, we're going to enable you to have the system work, the way you want. Yeah, 100%. There's a lot of configuration capability, but there's also the movement towards, you know, continuing to be very API friendly as an example and the the thought around bring your
own. So now, you know, we want to encourage customers and partners to do things like build their own integration. Nations build their own, you eyes and bring those things along. So, you know, not only can you configure the 80% of the standard capability that you might require the other 20% that you might want to make very specific to your unique business problems. You can bring it along with you because we have that extensibility layer to do so.
Building your own UI that is bold because I think that's something that normally most people would associate. It was the identity space with more of a consumer based approach where you've got like marketing and communication seems everyone. I like craft the customer experience and usually you'll see things like apis and stuff, kind of power and things behind the scenes. And I guess this is maybe a little bit of news to me, so you can educate me. When you say build your own UI,
what are you talking about? So I would say that At a likely scenario would be mostly or more along the lines of third-party access governance. So, you know, it's not science necessarily but you have delegated Administration and you have diverse different business entities, different types of third, party users. And perhaps you want to create a very simplistic UI for the third party users.
Who are accessing your system. That's just that's one thing that comes to mind but, you know, there's a lot of configuration within the UI itself. So there's not a necessity to bring your own, we just wanted to give that extensibility to customers. I would say, you know, Integrations are probably more popular than say, bring your bring your own UI. So here's the topic that Jeff and I run into a time, right?
You have the potential client where Their HR Group is saying our HR System is for employees only, we're only going to manage employee data yet. They have all these non-employee users contractors Consultants guests and you as an IGA vendor or really is like a consultant to your clients. How do you recommend that they address that problem? Is it manage those people in our solution or look at some other solution created? The base. What what is your approach to that problem?
It's often managing an hour solution, you know, we have third party access management, so you can do the whole cradle-to-grave full lifecycle management of those identities. So, that's kind of the Consulting role of working with your clients and one of the big themes here at Gartner. This week was talking about selling and I am program within
the business rate. I think the way you know I've referred to how Rebecca who is Talk about Bri, you know, there's this value of I am, was, you know, we're going from having a seat at the Kids Table to having a seat at the adults table. I am is being taken seriously now, right? But the way we need to communicate the value is in terms of the business value that I am praying, so business results. Are you helping your clients with in terms of like expressing that value? Explain that value?
Is that something that's in your wheelhouse or something? They're doing ahead of time? No, it's in our wheelhouse. I would say, oftentimes customers Focus so much on very explicit requirements because you're talking to technology folks. So we, it is our responsibility as subject matter experts to take those requirements and really understand what's at the root. Roots of them wanting to do something in a certain manner or, you know, supporting a particular use case.
So, you know, we always have to explain business value. I go back to my days of Consulting, the the so, what you're going to do this. So what, you know, what does it mean to the business? Well, you know, if you're going to implement, you know, Pierre analytics as part of your access
request process. The so what it is that it is going to suggest you the appropriate access and it makes it faster more efficient and then there's less work for your end users and therefore they're spending less time managing their access. So we always have to go back to the. So what and the business value and ensuring that you know, we have the right level of risk balance with the right level of, you know, business process and efficiency. Yeah. I think that's the big partnership.
We're a technology vendor or Consulting partner can bring to their clients has you know being able to help articulate that message and kind of, you know, one of the thoughts. I was also having a sure you kind of run into this. A lot is, how do you help clients hit the ground quickly, rather than like buying software and then kind of coming up to me? It's like, you know, you need to have that roadmap, you need to have that plan. Before you, you know, execute your contract and that clock
starts ticking read the bills. Start piling up pretty quickly and you want to get something out there in production as quickly as possible. And reality like the scenario where you buy the software and it becomes self-aware for your the technology vendor doesn't want that, right? That's it's like not like our goalie. Hey like was like gym, memberships, like I think Jim's like to sell memberships and The people stop dumbbell upright, they don't show up, that's their bhisma.
I don't think that technology vendors want that, right? We don't and in fact, we've done a lot of things to be able to implement micro phases microprojects and six eight, ten weeks to drive that value. So something that I think is interesting that, you know, we do as an organization is you know, the concepts in selling. You have mutual action plans.
So what are the steps that are required Acquired to essentially, get a customer to buy a solution and and what we do is we create a technology aspect of that. What are the things that need to happen for the customer to, truly understand the advantage of the solution? And then break it down into little teeny, tiny Parts. Because we're still in a situation where all the education that we're doing is really being done through Zoom. There's still a lot of fatigue in these, these room.
Meetings. People don't want to be in 345 our Workshop settings so we break it down into technical action plans, so that we peel back the onion. We really can focus in on the pain points and then we can drive a strategy that aligns with essentially, like a quick start approach to getting something laid down for the customer, so that we don't take time between, you know, a customer being on board. Added as a saving a customer and then seeing that value. So we try to set that up in
advance through those workshops. I love that idea that what you call it quick action plan, but like four weeks six weeks, eight weeks of value. Give us some examples of like what the scope of something like that might look like. Yeah. So I would say, for example, you know, taking some number of critical applications and Just going back to what is your data look like. So something that's very easy as you start with the data.
What does that mean? Well, let's look at your risky entitlements for particular number of applications and let's get it through a certification. Let's get the revokes in place and let's clean up the data. So very very quick way to get a win in eight to ten weeks. Yeah, for an organization that's About to spend money on an IGA solution, you can be pretty sure there's some data issues, right? There's going to be some say it's always cobs. What I'm talking about man.
Yeah, you give me some cobwebs in that data. So they get data cleanup exercise, where you can leverage that investment is a fantastic idea. You need to do the cleanup, right? But you don't want to take six months and that's all you do, right? So if you can kind of lay down, some technology footprint, sir. To import that data correlated, look for the bad stuff and maybe gate your user interface out to some business users. Who can start to, you know, knock out the cobwebs. Great idea.
Yeah. And a super high-value activity is around, you know, Pam remove standing access standing privilege. Get just-in-time laid down, you know, for a series of users and we turn that on and get it. Implemented for customers in six weeks. So now you've just taken some of that privilege and administration burden away from, you know, your classic users that have just too much privilege.
So eliminate that very quickly. Yeah, what I'm hearing is Jamie's going to come to your house and in six weeks all, while your identity problem. Not going to try here, she's gonna get in there. She should clean your data. Everything's gonna be just in time micro phases. Projects, build, success, build momentum.
We all want to, I'm sorry if you think that, then if you think it's gonna all be done in six weeks, like I've got some beachfront property in Nebraska, I've got a saw you, but you can get stuff done. You can get stuff done. It doesn't always have to be like this. Gee whiz, you know, huge public facing thing. It could be. Yeah, we got the data cleaned up and that's a precursor and guess what the data is clean now.
Like it's going to be used other places to that could be an example, could be a very basic Workflow to do basic onboarding basic off-boarding. I feel like sometimes we get lost in the grand picture that we forget to celebrate the little lens on the way, I think. That's where the best road maps come in is, how do you show iterative improvements, right? Can't just go say, Hey, you go me to give me 2 million dollars and I'll come back with a night. And I am platform in two years,
like, that's not gonna happen. Yeah, we talked about it is, get clean. Stay clean. Mmm. Yeah. Well I also think that in certain situations as the I am program manager or Of you know the practitioner, it takes some some bold leadership, sometimes to, you know work up the chain and say we're not going to be flipping a switch and nine months, all of our problems aren't going to go away. It is a matter of we're going to be running an IM program from
now. Until we both retire, we're always going to be in this game and we're going to get ourselves, you know, make the path to better. But in nine months all of our problems are going to be solved. That's sometimes hard just delivering bad news, right? That nobody wants to hear my spending a million dollars to get better. Well, that's that's the world we live in. Now, there's always look the
look for guarantees, right? It's, if I give this to you, I will never have another audit finding again. Ya know, you're reducing the risk. The chance of it happening, maybe, but it's not a real like realistic expectation. Yeah. All right. Let's And start to wrap things up. But before we go why know that we have Star Wars Super Fan over here next to me. So we're going to close it on a lighter note. I've got actually a couple, the first one. Yes. Who or what is your favorite
Star Wars character? I know what you're going to say. I'm going to ask you for an alternate. I don't want rules. I mean it has to be Leia. Okay? Every little girl loved Princess Leia because she embodies empathy and she brings together people for the greater good. And that's what I like to think. I do. You still have those big buns on the side of your when I can you can't? I've seen the pictures. All right? And then my My second question, still in the Star Wars Universe
you have a daughter. What order did you show her? The Star Wars movies and obviously we started with episode for the true first episode. The true first episode A New Hope and then we moved on to five and six and then we went seven, eight and nine because one, two and three, they just don't exist. Slow curveball here. Hmm. I liked what I mean look I I like Star Wars. I like them all. Sure, there were some annoying things. Even 789 had some weird stuff
somehow Palpatine returned. This is the ladies. Yes, piece of writing, I think I've ever heard in a major like franchise, but I still enjoy it for what it is. Well, I can tell you that Ray is also very well-liked in the household. Okay. Mhm. I would say she's a second favorite. Okay, I can see it. Jim favorite Star Wars character. Captain Picard I'm not expect it boy. There goes all of our credibility. You've been listening to the last episode of Daredevil in
certain pockets. It's right. It's gonna be a solo show going forward and I like to look at my new clothes. Jamie I'm gonna go with Han Solo just cause I always thought he was bad ass. And, you know, any orange jumpsuit known on the orange jumpsuit. That was the best console. What. Yeah. What are you talking about? We know that's wrong. Captive card. All right, we're going to call this one because it's gone off the rails. Yep. We're we've gone off the tracks.
All right, thank you very much for joining. It's good to see you again. Lovely to see you. Another part of the family here from Identity, as far as we go, you can find us on the web identity to center.com. We're on Twitter at idea. See podcast. If you want to learn more about savings and connect with, Jamie will have Shola links in the show notes, but you can find save Aunt, essay, Avi ynt.com and we'll go ahead and leave it
there for this week. Thanks everyone for listening and we'll talk with everyone in the next one. Thanks for listening to the identity at the center podcast. If you like what you heard, don't forget to subscribe and visit us on the web and identity at the center.com.